After an absence of a month, I apologize to my regular readers who may have given up waiting for the conclusion to the "Miracles for the 21st Century" series. Finals month finally arrived, and I drove the 850 miles home to be with my family while I wrote my papers. This was probably not the speediest solution, though my children thought it the only one. When I arrived, I immediately found plumbing, electrical and yard maintenance problems that had been postponed for 8 months. Then there was a daughter's engagement among other pressing personal issues, so I beg your indulgence.

This is not to say that I was idle. My seminary paper for "hermeneutical foundations" considers the development of the 21st century philosophy and its impact on interpretation of the Bible, aka "Hermeneutics". This Hegelian philosophy turns out to be ubiquitous, as the next discussion of "4th Law of Thermodynamics" suggests, as well as a recent column by a theoretical physicist/cosmologist who thinks he has cut the Gordian knot on multiverse. So stay tuned for a series on "Science for the 21st Century".

  
  Procrustes --
   serving you all the data that fits.

Hidden Messages within the Genetic Code

Since ancient times, astronomers have stared up at the night sky (once thought to be a tent canopy), hoping for clues that would allow them to learn something about the universe. The Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence (SETI) uses radiotelescopes to listen for signals transmitted by intelligent alien beings. This sort of work involves searching through a vast amount of data, hoping to find a discrete signal in the noise.
Now we have entered the genomics era, which has lead to an entirely new group of gazers--the sequence gazers. There is undoubtedly much to be learned through careful analysis of sequence data, and likely, there may be discrete signals that can be pulled out of the vast amount of sequence. These signals, or hidden messages, are encoded by the DNA, just waiting to be discovered. On 23 March 2004, the GenBank nonredundant database was analyzed in hopes to discover a hidden message. The abundances of five different combinations of proline, histidine, alanine, glycine, and glutamate were examined in 2,707,913 sequences. As shown below, “PHAGE” was recovered much more frequently (P<0.001) than the other combinations of amino acids tested.
PHAGE 515
PAGEH 203
PAHGE 196
PAGHE 146
HPAGE 133
Coincidence?
We think not. The chances for each of these combinations to occur is equal. Given that, why does PHAGE occur so frequently? This simply must be one of those occasions where a signal is decoded from all the sequence. We truly are entering “The Age of Phage.” Phage are the most abundant biological entities on the planet, and apparently, they are trying to tell us something…
Rob Edwards
University of Tennessee at Memphis--Memphis, Tenn.
Mya Breibart
Forest Rohwer
San Diego State University--San Diego, Calif.

...TED winner and well known SETI personality Jill Tarter was asked whether she's considered looking at the information signal/information in DNA since it defies all current explanations. She responded with "coding in our DNA has been considered, but not for a while. So why would wet biology be preferable to electromagnetic signals?"

I've tried to make this argument before, though it hasn't gained much traction. Here's the parabolic storyline roughly following Arthur C. Clarke's "2001" and "Childhood's End" plot.

Suppose that the SETI project was begun in the year 1880 before Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves and before Marconi harnessed them for radio. How would SETI look for alien intelligence trying to communicate with us? Why with the telegraph of course! They'd be looking for telegraph lines on Mars, analyzing photographs for evidence of telegraph lines in space... IOW, we always think that our most recent technology is the technology that aliens would use to communicate with us, when in fact, it is the most transient part.

But now suppose that aliens have mastered quantum mechanics, and use quantum teleportation to do their communicating. It means they can cover the galaxy with almost zero wattage without suffering from noise, and signals are observable the moment a civilization leaves behind the childhood of Newtonian mechanistic marbles and understands the power of wavefunctions and non-locality. Then the goal for SETI is building a quantum teleportation antenna / receiver. What would it look like?

Well, it would possess a wavefunction that can be entangled with the transmitter, as well as a consciousness that can detect and collapse the wavefunction. Roger Penrose thinks that the brain has just such an entangled wavefunction that permits consciousness. Perhaps putting a lot of brains together, e.g, an institute or global culture, will increase the signal strength, as all the brains overlap and entangle their wavefunctions simultaneously. Maybe the World President can decree one hour of "thinking positive thoughts" that can be beamed across the galaxy.... IOW, why not wetware? It's the future. EM signals are getting as stale as telegraphy.

Now, suppose that this alien race has already contacted us, but found us not ready for prime time. So it wanted to leave a bunch of receivers lying around for our use when we are ready to talk. Where would it put them? In the phage DNA of course! (Sorry Clarke, monoliths are sooo Mesolithic.)

Now if SETI-types can swallow the idea of a "beneficent alien", as Dawkins proposed in Stein's movie Expelled, then it would seem a small step to a "beneficent designer" and thence to "God". Which perhaps, is the reason Dawkins can't make himself take the step.

A response to Roddy Bullock's post:
Life: (More Than) Some Assembly Required
 
When I took college physics in the 70's from Howard Claussen, who co-invented Teflon (and we whispered in the halls, deserved the Nobel prize), he used to ask us "what is the entropy difference between a live cow and a dead cow?"

None of us knew how to answer that question. Nor did any of my graduate school profs. The problem is that physics did not have a very good handle on the entropy of anything, much less the entropy of life. Oh sure, we could calculate the entropy of mono-atomic ideal gases, but even diatomic gasses became a challenge, much less a living organism. Reductionism, as any biologist will tell you, is the sin of physicists. So when you asked about cats, I couldn't help but think of my esteemed professor's question. In the 30 years since, I think I have the beginning of an answer.

Entropy, as the textbook would say, is proportional to the logarithm of the number of states of the system: S=k ln Ω. "The system" being the 6-dimensional phase space for (mono-atomic gas) particles f(x,y,z,vx,vy,vz). But then it is illustrated with marbles in a shoebox, and we are led to believe that only (x,y,z) are important. If instead we try keep track of (vx,vy,vz) of the particles, we end up with a LOT more states because each particle can be going in just about any direction! Just for fun I argue, lets take the Fourier transform of phase space, F, and note that here the position "disappears" but the velocity comes into focus. Then a good approximation to the total entropy of the (mono-atomic ideal gas) is

S_total = S(f(x,y,z)) + S(F(vx,vy,vz)).

I like to think of it as the sum of space-entropy and time-entropy.

The consequences for cats and cows, is that the elements of the dead cat are all in the same places as the live one, but the velocities are all different. That is, when a cat is alive, everything in it is in motion, the blood through the heart, the electricity through the brain, the ATP through the cells; but when it is dead, everything stops.

The consequences for scientists who want to make "life from scratch", is that they not only have to get all the right ingredients together, but they have to get all the motion too. Getting Frankenstein's monster to sit up takes more than electricity, but a heart-lung machine, a alpha-wave machine, (cellular bots?) etc.

If they think that "just add water" is proof of artificial life, then bacterial spores have been continuous proof of spontaneous generation for 200 years despite Pasteur's miserable failure to convince us otherwise. Which perhaps is the only good thing to come out of this hopeless religiously-driven research: that perhaps we can understand how bacterial spores can go into suspended animation, seemingly without time-entropy, and yet come to life with water.

I had three conversations about miracles in the last 18 hours, and concluded that it still needed some clarification. So here is my third installment in what may become a soap. (Installment 1 here, and 2 here.)

3) This morning, a request came into the library for an interlibrary loan, but for periodicals, they only Xerox the article and mail off a copy. The librarian asked me if I was interested in the topic, and I quickly scanned them. They were all from journals in the past year.

  i) The first one was a theologian defending against Hume's critique of miracles. Seems that there are still people who find Hume convincing.
  ii) The second was a philosopher defending miracles against the claims of methodological naturalism, which defined miracles as impossible events, so of course there can't be any scientific proof for their existence.
  iii) The third was a Frenchman defending the miracle of extraterrestrial life as a prediction of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the evolution of religion.

So the first two articles were stuck firmly in the 20th Modernist Century with its faith in progress and the rejection of God. And the last is the characteristic of the 21st PoMo Century with its faith in process and the emergence of God. Either God doesn't exist or He's still arriving. Why do we swing from one extreme to the other? Why do we go from Atheism to Pantheism, from the absence of God to the ubiquity of gods? Can't we camp out in Theism for a while, after all, isn't that where Science lives? That's the question this blog is addressing.

The librarian started talking to me about a book he was reading that had the NYT writing effusive reviews and Al Mohler not-so-effusive, The Shack.   Guess what the answer to the problem of evil is? Nope, not atheism, try again. Nope, evil isn't just in your head, one more try. Yup, God is emerging. Seems we are on a roll here with Hegel.

Hegel?

Yes, the study of 200 year-old GWF Hegel explained a lot of things I didn't understand about PoMo. Such as why PoMo wants God to be always changing, when frankly, I thought it was one of God's better points, that He never changed. But it seems that this either makes God unapproachable or outdated, take your pick. Recall how we arrived at this impasse: first we made the world a watch, then we made God the watchmaker, then we complained that good watches don't need repairmen, and finally we said that watches have always been around without watchmakers. But since this conclusion led directly to the Holocaust, everyone is now looking for an exit.

Hegel provided exactly the wide sort of exit everyone wanted. He said that the world isn't a watch, but filled with God. In fact, God needs the world to explain Himself, since without the world He'd be that unapproachable heavenly watchmaker that caused so much trouble before. Now Hegel prided himself on being a civilized German, and didn't want to be confused with Hindu pantheists, so he preferred Greek terminology. God was the Absolute, and represents the Ideal.  In this century Heidegger likens God to "Being", and Tillich is famous for calling God "the ground of Being". Whitehead, about 100 years after Hegel, was a no-nonsense Brit who called his his philosophy "panentheism", meaning God is of the world but the world is bigger than God. (You will notice that the more vague the term, the more popular it is with philosophers.)

What all these philosophers are trying to do is make God accessible. Or as they say in seminary, to make him immanent. They all feel that the danger of Kant and Christianity is that God is so transcendent he has no interest in us or in our time frame. And a God who isn't there expires, in Nietzsche's words "God is dead."

But there are real consequences with having a God who is only of the world. It means that God really is stuck in time like you and I.  Long before The Shack, Conservative Rabbi Harold Kuschner wrote a bestseller "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" on the problem of evil, concluding that God is entirely good and knows our pain, but just can't do anything about it either. A bit of a letdown, if you ask me. Which is worse, a God who is powerful but never around, or a God who is always around but can't fix anything?

"Oh, but he can," say the Bergsons and Tiplers and the de Chardins, "in the last day, at the Omega point, when everything reaches perfection, then it will all come out alright.  You'll see, we are all getting better and better until that unity with the Absolute Mind will remove all imperfection."

I think you are getting the drift. There isn't a dime's worth of difference between all these versions of Hegelian dogma and Hindu pantheism or even Buddhist nihilism. You might even start drawing parallels: since the world is all deception and all these varieties of truth a part of the One Big Truth, we can celebrate our diversity, our local gods, our Gaias and Earth Days, our Easters and Ramadans, for they are all part of the web of being, the dance of life, the destiny of time. We are just motes in the eye of God, molecules in the ocean of love, etc etc.

With a half hour of practice and a few websites for material, you could probably spin this sort of thing for a lifetime. Hegel, with more German circumspection, called this process "dialectic", and  convinced everyone that with the destination fixed in the final dissolution in the Absolute, the only thing we needed to worry about was the journey. And in fact, debate was to be encouraged, for thesis would lead to antithesis and thence to synthesis in a never ending argument of history inexorably drawing us higher and higher to that final ecstatic union with the borg.  History resolved all problems. History lead inevitably to Hegel's own philosophy (why am I not surprised?). The History of man is the history of God.

So to recap, we were appalled by atheism and its excesses, so we rejected the Newtonian view of the world as a machine. At first we found refuge in a separationist dualism along with the Romantics, hiding behind the Kantian wall, but physics and history has not been kind to the wall; it is cracking and the barbarians are at the gates. Making the best of a rather desperate situation, we are ready to sally forth, reclaiming the burnt-over lands of time and space for the God who needs circumstances and people to realize Himself.  Rather than languishing in an artsy ghetto, we are now emboldened to recognize that God is revealing Himself through us. Everybody's special now.

Just one little problem. To quote the Incredibles, if everyone is special, then nobody's special.

Unless, to quote Napoleon, "some are more equal than others."

Karl Marx took Hegel seriously and said if history is our destiny, then let us change it! Let us accelerate the progress of mankind by forcing everyone to improve. We'll all arrive at the endpoint so much faster that way. And those who are hindering history will just have to be removed as efficiently and speedily as possible.  All for Progress and Progress for All!

So strangely enough, both atheistic monism and pantheistic monism, despite claiming to be complete opposites, end up in exactly the same place and with the same slogans: WWII, with atheist Hegelian communism and pantheist Hegelian racism in the battle of Berlin.  Rather like today where the diversity slogans that were meant to encourage tolerance are now punishing speech for being intolerant, even when it consists of revelation or miracles.

What then do we do with revelation, with miracles, with God's messages to us today?

"Well, honey, if you want to believe in miracles, that's just fine with us, so long as you get with the program. Just don't go saying embarrassing things about anyone else. No criticism, just positive energy. We're all in this together. Understand?"

We have gone from an Atheist "miracles don't exist", to a Kantian "miracles are myths," to a Hegelian "all miracles are equal", or, "miracles all say the same thing".  Either nothing is a miracle or everything is a miracle, since either nothing is God or everything is God. So the one thing a miracle can't be is the one thing it must be: something special. It may be true, as GK Chesterton pointed out, that the sun rising every day is a miracle, but for most of us, the regularity has erased its unique message. On the other hand, when the EMT pulled 6 unbelted but undamaged children out of my wrecked Suburban, there was little doubt they had witnessed a miracle.

The Atheist says miracles are dumb, the Kantian that they are lies, and the Hegelian that they are garrulous. None of them let miracles say what they are shouting for all to hear.

In the next and last installment, we'll look at what miracles say.   To be continued...

I had three conversations about miracles in the last 18 hours, and concluded that it still needed some clarification. So here is my second installment in what may become a daily soap. (Part 1 is here.)

2) On the way home from the panel, I had a long conversation with Drs. Poythress about the significance of the other panelists response. When the moderator asked how they combined their science with their faith,  one replied that "I just do science", and the other opined that "my faith isn't shaken by science", amplifying with a disturbing scientific discovery that they just accepted. In other words, there appears to be no connection between science and faith.

"Two Kantians versus one VanTillian!" I said.

But despite the claim that science has not shaken their faith, both of the other panelists made the statement that the Bible contains myth. It was the only time I saw Dr Poythress agitated; it was all he could do to keep from interrupting, waiting for the moderator to acknowledge him before blurting out "I don't believe there is any myth in the Bible!"  One of the panelists was not so reserved, shaking her head and restating her opinion.

Now what is peculiar, is that 50 years ago in their member churches, "them's fightin' words". What was unreconcilable, unadulterated "liberalism" for their grandparents, has become mainstream conservatism today. How did "myth" creep into this Kantian wall of separation between church and state?

To answer that question, we'll have to do some history.

Before Christ, at the dawn of Greek civilization, pre-Socratic philosophers were trying to understand how the world could be both beautiful and true, both varied and understandable, both changing and always the same. On the one hand, every person you meet is a unique, different, distinct, person, yet on the other hand they are all people, intelligent, recognizable human beings. Different but also the same. 

Parmenides thought that at the foundation we all exist, and all existences are one, so it is change and variety that is the deception. He had a great influence on Plato, and echoes of his philosophy can be seen right down to the present. Heraclitus took the opposite view, that change was the characteristic of life, that we "cannot step in the same river twice." Leucippus (and later Democritus) tried to find a compromise, that the atoms are unchangeable, but they are ever moving and combining in new ways that lead to change. And there, at the beginning of the classical world, you have the problem of "the one and the many".

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle gave an answer to the one-and-many problem that dominated the entire classical world, and indeed, the medieval world so much so that a classical education, whether of Platonic or Aristotelian flavor, saw Truth as a unitary goal of educational Trivium: Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric. Whenever any of these disciplines sought a different goal, they were roundly criticized. Both Plato and Aristotle seemed to reserve their greatest invective for the Sophists, who valued Rhetoric for its social and political benefits rather than its spiritual and unifying benefits.

With the Christianization of the Roman world, all of these techniques came over into Christendom, merely by exchanging the goals of Greece with the goals of Christ. Although there was much development throughout the Medieval period, the first major crisis came with the Enlightenment, and the breakdown of the Medieval synthesis.

Inductive truth competed with deductive truth, and rhetoric lost its pre-eminent position in the Trivium since argumentation could easily be trumped by experimentation. (eg, Aristotle's arguments that heavy objects fall faster than lighter objects could be disproved in 15 seconds with an experiment in Pisa.)

In other words, the pre-Socratic dilemma of the one-and-the-many had resurfaced, and philosophers were at a loss to reconcile the new sciences with the old synthesis. Just as in classical Greece, skeptics proliferated in this now uncertain environment with the most famous being the apostate David Hume. Later on his analysis would be called an epistemological critique, but the Medieval synthesis did not so compartmentalize its philosophy; it was equally a critique of ethics, theology, and metaphysics, which is what made it attractive to atheists.

In this environment, Immanuel Kant's 1781 Critique of Pure Reason marks a watershed, solving the confusion of skepticism (as well as rescuing theology from the atheists, he believed) with an essential duality between Science and Thought. That is, the world of science and experiments was irrevocably separated from the world of mind and logic by the untrustworthy senses that mediated between the two. Notice the parallels between the pre-Socratic materialist solution of Democrites and that of Kant.

But Kant's solution was not universally admired, and this led to GWF Hegel's development of idealism (~1816) and his lectures on history (1822-23), that inverted the role between the mind and the sciences, arguing that there was a dialectic of Mind working through time that ever produced dualities and braided their syntheses back together again. You might also note the parallels to both Heraclitus, the change being part of the essential unity of Mind.

Therefore by the middle of the 19th century, we had three basic solutions to the problem of the one-and-many,  (which can also be analyzed as metaphysics and/or epistemology): an Enlightenment faith in Science (subsuming Mind); a Kantian Dualism (separate but equal); and Hegelian faith in Mind/Process (subsuming Science). We might also stereotype these views with respect to religion as: atheist monists, theist dualists, and pantheist monists.

This intellectual history neglects what was going on politically. As any historian will tell you, they are not unrelated events. For the Enlightenment view dominated France in 1789 and directly led to the Reign of Terror. This caused a lot of theologians (and politicians like Edmund Burke) to reconsider how best to handle this overzealous faith in Science that abolished God. Kant's dualism suggested that we should let them both live in peace, doing what each does best.

If France was an aberration, it was only that it was a century ahead of its time. Napolean's wars and the rise of the Prussian state set the stage for a reenactment in the 20th century wars of Modernism. Thus throughout the 1800's as Enlightenment though became more and more pervasive, theologians were turning to Kant for a way to reconcile the Church and State. 

The basic conclusion was that morality was a matter of the heart, which the Church could teach best, whereas civility was a matter of the brain, which the state could teach best. Overlapping areas like Miracles were addressed with a compromise: the brain knows they aren't true, and for matters of state we don't allow them to exist, but the heart needs them to be true, so for matters of morality we allow pious belief in their importance. This schizophrenic approach was hard to sustain, and therefore many bright scholars attempted to resolve again this hoary "one-and-many" problem.

In 1921, Rudolf Bultmann published a careful account of how Kant could "de-mythologize"  the Bible without losing its importance, and for the next 50 years, this was the reigning paradigm in theology circles. The idea was that "myth" was something not scientifically true, but morally true, and thus to make the Bible acceptable to an Enlightenment world, which would be of great help restraining their immoral behaviour, one should go through the Bible with a pink highlighter, separating the myth from the facts. 

Now that we have a properly highlighted Bible, we can immediately see which parts are meant for our moral development, and which for our mental development. Bultmann, like Kant before him, saw this as a vast improvement over immoral atheism that would slaughter men as if they were animals. Miracles, as Bultmann carefully explained, were myths that could not possibly be scientific, but were meant for our edification.

This was the view of the two other panellists that night. There is just one problem with it. The Resurrection is highlighted in pink.

Can one disbelieve in Miracles and still believe in a resurrected Christ? And if Christ was not resurrected, was one still a Christian? St Paul, an otherwise unmythological favorite of Bultmann's, thought differently. But then, St Paul didn't have Kant. Could we achieve today what Paul could not achieve in the classical world? What does history tell us?

History has not been kind to Bultmann; first the evangelicals attacked him, and later the liberals. But in a peculiar way, physics attacked him first. In 1924 De Broglie began the deconstruction of Democritean materialism with his thesis on electrons as waves. In time this became the weird world of Quantum Mechanics that destroyed Kant's separation between mind and matter.

It has been, however, a long, slow death. As we noted earlier, politics seems to precede philosophy in these areas. Just as evangelicals became more politically involved in the 1980's, so also they found their rigid separation of church and state was too confining. The realignment of the Republican party under Ronald Reagan, which recombined church and state was preceded by a realignment of the Democratic party in 1968 with the atheist monists, which bore fruit in the election of 2008. The Kantian respect between the natural sciences and the liberal arts had vanished, so that by 2006 the Nobel laureate and president of Harvard could be ejected for "disrespecting" the liberal arts faculty.

But as usual, reactionary evangelicals are the last to hear the news, hence the reliance on poor dead Kant at the panel last night. No, that's unfair to them. They rely on Kant because they are scientists trying to maintain the mutual respect that keeps them their jobs.

Unfortunately, it is a losing battle.  One way of understanding the movie "Expelled", the documentary of academic persecution, is to view it as the result of the Kantian wall crumbling along with the Berlin wall.

How can we then live? If there is no respect between science and faith, we are at the mercy of the one with power? Are the wars of religion next? How do we resolve the problem of the one-and-many, of miracles for the 21st century?

The answer takes us to Hegel, and the next installment.

To be continued...

I had three conversations about miracles in the last 18 hours, and concluded that it still needed some clarification. So here is my first installment in what may become a soap.

1) Last evening, we had a "Writers Group" meeting, where I brought my blog "The Physics of Miracles". They all liked the story-telling, but struggled with the philosophy. "What do you mean by miracles?" they asked me, "And why do you say there are no scientific laws?"

Then last night at Princeton University, I attended a panel discussion on "Faith and Science", where the question came up about miracles as violations of scientific laws. One of the panelists, my advisor Dr Vern Poythress, had written an entire book on the subject "Redeeming Science". (You can support this amazing man by buying his book, but if you have good reasons for being a skinflint, he also makes the PDF available for non-commercial use.) In his book, as well as at the panel, he makes the point that "scientific laws" reflect an outlook on Nature that sees it as an impersonal, mechanical machine, in contrast, say, to a stone-age animist who sees Nature as anthropomorphic spirits, or a Christian who sees Nature as the actions of a personal God.

But isn't Nature impersonal?

The impersonal machine metaphor for Nature (and yes, everything we know is analogous and metaphorical) only arose in the Enlightenment. Some historians of science argue that it was the public awe and admiration of the invention of the pocket watch, (exemplified in William Paley's famous 1801 book on ID and ridiculed by Richard Dawkins in "The Blind Watchmaker") that made everyone think of the universe as  God's pocket watch. Newton's calculus explained the orbits of the planets as precisely as a watch kept time, and thus he was credited with causing the paradigm shift in the view of the cosmos. Realize that for 1000 years before Newton, planetary motion was calculated with circles inside circles, epicycles that looked vaguely machine-like, but without a motive force, without gears or laws or design, so it was considered merely a description of God's actions, not a prescription of a mechanism. Also notice that a century earlier, Descartes had failed in an attempt to find a motive force for the orbits of the planets as vortices of liquid, but since machines aren't made out of liquids, the paradigm shift had to wait for Newton.

So it really has been for a little more than 2 centuries that science can talk about discovering "laws". And these have been very fruitful centuries of scientific progress. Make no mistake, treating Nature as a machine is tremendously productive.

Nevertheless, it comes at a price. We have separated God from His creation, making the machine independent of Him. The 19th century opened with Deists like William Paley, who proposed that God made the Universe as a really complicated watch, wound it up and stepped back. Then the 20th century opened with Atheists like Russell and Einstein who kept the watch, but did away with the Watchmaker, or at least, made Him so distant that He's out of calling range. Then followed the most devastating and global wars in human history, merging with the most deadly and genocidal purges in human history: WWI, WWII, Korea, Cold War-Gulag, VietNam-Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan. It was and remains a steep price to pay for banishing God.

But we need not become Atheists or even Deists; we can give God a job running Nature. We just have to shed the idea that the universe is a machine.

Does this mean adopting an animist or pantheist view that God = Nature?

No. That was the pagan view supplanted by Christianity. It is as much a deadly snare as the materialist machine. There is a reason, after all, that Science arose only in the West, and only after 1000 years of educating the pagan mind. Because paganism or pantheism prohibits science. We can't go back to that view no matter how attractive a Hindu or a Wiccan religion might appear without destroying the progress of three centuries.

But you will notice that science did not arise in a mechanistic Enlightenment world, it arose in a medieval Christian world, and was appropriated by people like Newton. That is, all those great minds of the Enlightenment were educated in a pre-scientific world at universities that taught Greek and Hebrew and the classics. It took two or three centuries before atheism finally expunged the last remnants of Christianity and attempted their grand experiment of the Atheist State. So contrary to what you may have read, it was not the Enlightenment that produced Science, but medieval Christianity that produced the science that brought the Enlightenment.

Therefore after the abject failure of the Modernist Century, perhaps we should reconsider the elixir that produced the Newtons and Boyles and Pasteurs and Maxwells of the Enlightenment.

That elixir is purpose.

The laws of Nature then, are not impersonal rules of an intricate machine. Nor are they the material embodiment of an emergent will. Rather they are the regularities of a personal God. It is God's transcendent faithfulness that makes them regular. It is God's imminent concern that makes them purposive. So a miracle is not a violation of an impersonal machine, but a loving response to a personal request.

But GK Chesterton, in his wide-ranging critique of materialism published in 1911, said it all so much better!

The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are. But when I came to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated. Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

Chesterton then makes the point that Dr Poythress made on the panel. If regularities are personal, then even more so are the irregularities.

This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were wilful. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.

Chesterton wrote that in 1911, at the pinnacle of Modernism, and on the brink of two devastating global wars of atheism. As the world reeled back from the nihilism of mustard gas and Zyklon B, it searched for an answer to the onslaught of atheism. In the next post, I'll relate the next two conversations on this search. 

To be continued...

Could you explain what you mean about 'denying common descent'? I'm not sure what you mean by denying that - do you mean that different species/creatures are technically related, but because of things like horizontal gene transfer (and possibly introduce of 'new' genes via asteroids/comets and such) it isn't common descent in the way typically pictured?

I'll try to summarize the SPIE 2008 paper, where I attempt to develop this concept just a wee bit, though didn't spell it out explicitly at the time.

The idea is that horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is occurring some 81% of the time. This means that the entire field of "cladistics", which attempts to construct a genetic genealogy tree (pre-genetic trees were based on body shape or morphology with many problems, not least is that they couldn't do bacteria) or DNA is just plain wrong. This is because you can get genes from totally unrelated organisms by viral infection of gametes, the germ-line cells.

That is, in lower organisms, there is no difference between germ-line and somatic cells, the entire bacterium splits in half, or the yeast "buds" when it multiplies. Accordingly, any foreign DNA has the potential to get passed on to descendants. In higher organisms, somatic cell infections do not get passed on to the descendants, only gamete cells do that. Think of this as protection against viral DNA infections.

But what if the virus infects the gamete cells? How can the organism tell if its in danger of being permanently altered?

Well, think of the entire elaborate protocols involved in sexual reproduction. Not only is there a special behavior that can filter out infected individuals, but there are numerous "stress tests" for the gametes to filter out infected or damaged gamete cells. All of this makes it highly unlikely that there will be viruses that can co-opt a species. I also believe this is why most reproductive technologies are damaging to the baby (IVF, GIFT etc) because they apply the wrong kinds of stress test to the gametes.

Despite all this protection, viruses do get through, and infect the gametes. We know this by the presence o in the human genome (and I assume, in all the genomes we have transcribed to date), of "disabled" viral DNA as much as 8% of the total! However, the identification of viruses that have made it into the genome is based on "disabled" viruses, which means the really successful ones aren't so easily identified! The PNAS paper tried to use another algorithm to detect HGT, and concluded that 81% of the genome showed evidence of HGT.

So what does this mean for common descent?

Well, it means that a new species can appear when suddenly a new gene gets inserted into the genome of the mother, and the baby looks nothing like its mother. Or more likely, many genes get transferred but perhaps "disabled" until something "enables" them all, and a speciation event occurs. This "turning on" and "turning off" of genes is the latest hot topic in genetics and goes by the moniker "epigenetics". For example, many people have Herpes infections (cold sores), viruses that have inserted their viral RNA into the cell and lay dormant until stress "turns them on" and they break out in a cold sore. Another common one is CMV, or cytomegalovirus that is endemic to some 80% of the population, but only manifests itself when the immune system is suppressed, e.g. AIDS patients.

But doesn't this look just like Darwin's hypothesis of common descent?

No. Darwin was looking for random diffusion of genes, for small changes that accumulate. What we're saying is that due to HGT, there are rapid, discontinuous changes, perhaps triggered by an environmental stimulus.

But just as Neo-Darwinian theory (NDT) replaced Darwin's fuzzy inheritance with discrete Mendelian genes, couldn't we just reformulate evolution to include *random* HGT as the mechanism of speciation? Couldn't we adapt NDT to this new paradigm and still call it Evolution?

No. HGT and "turning on" the disabled genes by environmental factors means that suddenly, and for a purpose, speciation events occur in large populations. It is the "purpose" part that is non-Darwinian. The speciation event occurs in response to a stimulus, which means that Evolution is directed, it has a pre-planned function.

Let's give a hypothetical example. For 250,000 years, Neanderthals chased mega-fauna around the boreal forests of Eurasia. From isotope analysis, we know that they ate nothing but meat. But along comes the Eemian warming event that makes the Al Gore movie look tame. The glaciers retreat, the boreal forests are replaced by savannah, and the mega-fauna vanish. Your basic Neanderthal is suffering from malnutrition. This puts stress on his immune system and his gametes. One day he wakes up with the mumps, the virus infects his gonads, and nearly all his friends get the same infection. This goes on for a few centuries, and then one year it is so unbearably hot, that Neanderthals are dropping from heat exhaustion like flies. The few that make it through this event have progeny that are born hairless (the better to handle the heat) and seem to be nearly helpless for 5 or 10 years, but then as adolescents, start covering the cave walls with graffiti. And this isn't just him, but lots of wandering tribes seem to suddenly have these kinds of kids. Enough for them to meet each other and start their own tribe. So in this hypothetical example, a speciation event has occurred driven by an infection followed by a triggering event, or generally speaking, global climate change.

The point I'm trying to make, is that random viral infections should degenerate the population, not improve it. But this isn't a random viral infection, it is a purposive viral infection. It transferred a specific gene that lay latent until the environment demanded that it be "turned on". And while my Neanderthal scenario is totally fictional, we are close to having an entire Neanderthal genome transcribed, while simultaneously discovering how epigenetic switches can activate what was previously thought to be non-functional or "junk" DNA. In the very near future, we will have a good handle on the "hidden" information in our genome or in the Neanderthal genome that is waiting for an environmental trigger that can epigenetically turn it on.

Yet if that "hidden" information is not being expressed, then there is absolutely nothing in Darwin's Natural Selection that can select for or against it. So what is it doing there?

Anticipating a future need, otherwise known as purpose, design, intelligence, or planning. Therefore the actual data of Evolution show that Common Descent with Modification cannot explain these environmentally triggered speciation events. There's just way too much planning involved.

But where did the HGT virus get the gene in the first place?

Ah, that is the question isn't it? I tried to answer it in my spie08.pdf paper, but really only answered where the gene came from in the 2nd place -- from comets.

The 1st place is a much more profound question whose potential location(s) now expands to fill the entire galaxy. (And if my dark matter hypothesis is correct, see "Dirty Dozen" post, then the number of locations may expand to fill the entire universe.)

Someone asked me recently "what is the best evidence for Intelligent Design"? I know that may sound like an oxymoron to many of you, who think that ID is a philosophy or a religion and therefore cannot use evidence, its a matter of belief. [Recent FAQ on ID answers many of these Q.]

But if you are a long-time reader of this blog, you will know that I reject the Kantian divide between religion and science. To quote Albert Einstein, "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." That doesn't sound like strict separation to me, though if anything, I would say lame is too weak a word, "terminal" or "metastasized" might be more appropriate. And likewise blind is also too weak, "heretical" or "apostate" might be better.

Why such strong language? Because St Paul ties the whole point of Christianity to the scientific proof of a historical fact. And Science, whether it wants to admit it or not, only arose in the Christianized West, was founded by Christians, whose practitioners continue to use Christian metaphysics, and who only make progress when they functionally operate as if there is a Christian God. Sure, Einstein may say to the Princeton students that he barely believes in a Spinoza (pantheistic) God, but when he is in the heat of argument with Gnostic Niels Bohr, he insists "God doesn't play dice", which is a peculiar thing for a Spinozan to say (especially to a Gnostic!)

So yes, I do believe that ID can be both a philosophy/religion and use evidence, just as much as I believe that Darwinism can be a scientific theory and depend on philosophy/religion. The truth of the matter is that they are both, perhaps not in equal measures, but certainly in essential importance. For example, there are many books that say the best evidence for Christianity is the Resurrection. And perhaps equally many books that say the best evidence for Darwinism is evolution--the observation of change in species over time (as distinguished from capital "E" Evolution--the theory.)

Then what is the best evidence for Intelligent Design?

I think one defines by saying what it is not. So when ID is defined, it is "not chance". You can look at Dembski's "The Design Inference" and that's basically how it works.

Darwinism has two basic tenets: chance (natural selection), and common descent. I am inclined to say that the best argument for ID comes not from denying chance, but by denying common descent. That is, ID accepts as given that there has been evolution/change/development over time. Some have said "front loading" is the best way to describe this change, sort of like watching a seed sprout and flower from the "front-loading" of the DNA program in the germ of the seed. So common descent is not controverted, but the chance part is, so that species and speciation become like the development of a plant, with all life descending from the divine seed.

My argument is that speciation doesn't follow the analogy of a seed. Rather, it is more like the construction of a building. Carpenters are called in to do the framing, and then they leave and stonemasons do the the facing, and roofers do the roof, and electricians come in and do the wiring. Nothing about the half-finished building tells anyone what it will be, only the architect's blueprints in the hands of the main contractor. The blueprints do not build themselves, nor do they operate autonomously or by chance, but everything is semi-hierarchically arranged toward the goal. Everybody doesn't get the same subset of blueprints, or even know what the details of subsequent contractors jobs. The roofers probably have little concern for the electricians. But if a problem arises, say, an roofers truck is blocking the access to an electrical box, the solution doesn't involve referencing the original blueprints. [Aerospace engineering has a entire speciality devoted to this "systems engineering" problem.]

If one were to use a metric like "volume of enclosed space" or "density of enclosed space" or even "complexity of enclosed space" and then chart this metric for the evolution of the building, it would be very far from linear, in contrast to a growing seed.

So speciation and change are part of a grand plan, though individual parts may have no real idea what will come after them. The front-loading, if you will, is non-obvious to many participants. So how do we know or could we know that the Earth and its ecosystem and evolutionary history is a building and not a sprout?

a) Finding the partial blueprints and reconstructing the master ==> which to a certain extant, we have started to make progress on: typeing the genomes of many organisms, doing the historical development of organisms, etc.

b) Fractal distribution of information in the genome or in ecology or in time, indicate that the system has long-range space/time interactions. Long-range interactions are indicative of information, since random space/time events are diffusive and highly local.

c) Another indication is particularity of species and niches and adaptations. For diffusive information (see Dembski's "No Free Lunch" book) the potential species in "parameter space" must be dense, but when they are sparse, there is no diffusive, random solution. Sparse particularity is the characteristic of very low entropy systems, which are high information systems.

d) I'm not sure how significant this one is, but super-linear growth in information density, or even exponential growth would seem to be indicative of long-range temporal organization. That is, not just information, but information flow is significant for planning. During WWII this was the field of "Operations Research", which addressed the problem of getting the men and material to the front. Likewise, in evolution, how does one get the information to the lifeforms that need it?

All of this means that the "organic" paradigm of life multiplying itself into more and more varied niches as a continuum of evolution from a common ancestor can't explain the actual distribution in space and time.

I've used the analogy of a PC booting up Windows XP as an example of a recursively programmed, non-linear evolution of complexity. Life on Earth and its history are so far from being smooth, that the very thing Darwin set out to explain, cannot be explained by his method: change over time. The best evidence for ID then, is not the inability of the chance hypothesis to explain current information (design inference), but the distribution of information over space and time (e.g. "evolution") which cannot be attributed to a diffusive or even "organic" growth from a common ancestor.

Evolution is the best evidence for ID.

Two months ago, I blogged on Michael Brooks quitting his job at New Scientist and writing his "13 biggest scientific mysteries", which have been suppressed by the science establishment. This has generated a flurry of reviews, and now the New Scientist finally carries their review (though it might also be an abstract written by Brooks, I can't tell.) In any case, the list of items is now different.

For reference here is the table of contents from Brooks' book:
1: The Missing Universe (Dark Matter problem)
2: The Pioneer Anomaly (Pioneer spacecraft deflecting from Newtonian trajectory)
3: Varying Constants (physics constants seem to vary over geologic timescales)
4: Cold Fusion (is back and with more data)
5: Life (materialism vs intelligent design)
6: Viking (on Mars in 1976, the labelled release experiment found life)
7: The Wow! signal (radio telescope detected monochromatic beam)
8: A Giant Virus
9: Death (evo/devo debate in evolution)
10: Sex (seems overly complicated, and not at all Darwinian)
11: Free will (materialism doesn't allow it)
12: The Placebo Effect (swallowing sugar pills, injecting saline solution works like a drug)
13: Homeopathy (diluted medicine still works)

In looking over the list, I can see that the earlier blog addressed issues  1,2,7,9,10,11. My treatment of #1 was somewhat cursory, so let me address it at greater length.

1. The Missing Universe
The problem is simple, the Andromeda galaxy (and all other galaxies examined) should be flying apart because the gravity from stars is about 10% of the needed mass to hold everything together. Is there something we can't see (hence, dark) which is providing the gravity to hold the galaxy together?

Well, there has been no shortage of suggestions. The problem is whether any of them make sense. If they were, say, Jupiter sized planets, there would have to be 10-100X more of them than the stars. Many of them would be in orbit about stars, on average some 5-10 per star. We should see both "wobbling" of the star, as well as eclipsing of the star. And while we are up to about 100 extrasolar "Jupiters", it is nowhere near the number needed. The recently launched Kepler mission is designed to monitor 100,000 stars for this eclipsing behavior, and by all accounts should detect 1000's of such Jupiters at the current concentration, but far below the concentration needed to explain the dark matter problem.

Well, could it be hiding in Earth- or Moon-sized objects? Once again, the sheer quantity needed, some 1000-10,000 for each star, is daunting. But Kepler can certainly find even the small guys if they are there.

How about a gas, could the missing matter be hiding in clouds of cold hydrogen gas, the famous HI regions?  Well space is a pretty good vacuum, and the density of even these "dense" clouds would make vacuum-pump manufacturers envious. At 3 or even 10 atoms/cc, we're talking of galactic sized clouds to hold the necessary mass. And even at this low density, starlight passing through parsecs of hydrogen gets absorbed and re-emitted, causing the HI regions to glow, and also stamping the starlight with "absorption band" fingerprints. If the missing matter were gaseous, we would have lots of evidence of it.

What about those dark nebula that only absorb light? That's because they aren't gaseous, but dusty. And once again, there's enough dust there that its presence can be detected by blocking the light behind it. If the dust gets above a micron in size, then it collapses into the stars, if it is below a micron, it gets pushed around by starlight. So not only do we need more dust than is presently observed, but it won't stay put for the 12 billion year lifetime of the galaxy.

The problem is one of cross-sections. If we make the missing matter in small enough pieces to spread it evenly around, then it has such a large optical cross-section we can see it. If we make the missing matter in big chunks, then it has such a large gravitational cross-section we can see it.  This has led theorists to propose MACHOs and WIMPs, or massive compact halo objects and weakly interacting massive particles.

MACHOs are usually thought of as neutron stars, black holes, brown dwarfs, and other very faint stars. This is possible, though all of these have huge gravitational cross sections and should be observable by the things that get attracted to them. For example, black holes may not emit radiation, but when they pull gas from a neighboring star, they end up with an accretion disk that is extremely bright in the X-ray sky.

WIMPs are speculative subatomic particles like neutrinos that have some mass, yet don't emit or absorb light and have almost no interaction with matter. The problem is that neutrinos are thought to be about 10-15ev in mass, and there just aren't enough of them produced by stellar activity to account for the missing mass.  Furthermore, if 10X the mass of the sun is present in a gravitational halo around the sun of trapped WIMPs, we'd have noticed it by now.

A recent astronomical discovery of two galaxies passing through each other gave a whole new perspective on the problem. High optical cross section corresponds to high collision cross section, so if the missing matter were dust or smaller, the two galaxies should have had lots of hot matter at a bow shock. Well they had some, but when they mapped the gravity they found most of the mass was ahead of the shock, the dark matter of the two galaxies had interpenetrated without slowing down. So here is the mystery, the dark matter has both a small collision cross section and a small gravitational cross section. How can it be both?

The answer is deceptively simple. It is bigger than dust, smaller than planets, and "hot" enough to survive 12 billion years without coalescing. Fast-moving, black-crusty comets fit the bill perfectly (though Lou Frank's data don't). But to make all that ice would mean that big bang nucleosynthesis models, which predict the ratios of H/He/Li and very little O, must be off, or early universe star formation was much faster than expected. Both subjects are now getting re-examined (plasma physics was ignored in BBN models, and "cold flows" ignored in early universe cosmologies), and I suspect the hypothesis will be strengthened rather than weakened in coming years. And it would also provide another factor of a billion in the locations for life.

#2 we dealt with before.

#3 Varying Constants
 Physical constants are ratios that science can't explain, and therefore take as givens, boundary conditions, universal constants. Brandon Carter is famous for a 1974 neologism that explained how sensitive our universe is to those inexplicable constants, for if they had been any different, we wouldn't be here to observe it. This "fine-tuning argument" has been taken up by Intelligent Design and Creationists as evidence of a Creator, while the counter-arguments have been either
(a) Carter's original "Anthropic Principle", that since we couldn't observe any set of constants that exclude us, it is mere observational bias, and not evidence of "fine tuning"; or (b) there are gazillions of unobserved universes with different constants, which when combined with (a) allow pure chance to have provided our universe.

Now Eliot Sober is a U. Wisc at Madison philosopher  who really would like to support chance as the explanation of humans, but even he has trouble with argument (a). If you are inclined toward that argument, you should take a look at this paper using Baysean statistics. And despite the NYT suggesting that a multiverse theory doesn't exclude God, it implicitly requires that each baby universe in the set of multi-verses will have a different set of physical constants, which is no more supported than the idea of baby-universes in the first place. So breath-taking are these assumptions, that it is almost impossible to spoof, but Rob Bryanton has managed it, which is a funnier version of my "borg" disproof.

In any case, discovering that physical constants vary over geologic time would wreak havoc with both the "fine tuning" argument, as well as bolster the "multiverse" hypothesis. But mostly it would give cosmologists headaches. And my gut feeling is that it can't be true, that physical constants are tied up in the character of God, "in whom there is no shadow due to changing".

#4 Cold Fusion
This was one of those discoveries 15 years ago that everyone wanted to be true, but no one could duplicate. Consequently, the discoverers were branded charlatans, and run out on a rail. But nevertheless, a small core of true believers kept working on it, and 15 years later, there are repeatable results, albeit no theory to explain them. Historically this isn't so unreasonable, the discovery of superconductivity took 40 years to explain, and likewise spectroscopy took 100 years to explain the discrete lines. In our modern hubris, we think mysteries that last more than 4 years are like wars that last longer than 4 years: a complete and utter disaster. (I have also hypothesized that there are observational QM effects that may cause the results to depend on whether you believe in them.)

So I think Michael Brooks includes this mystery more because of the animosity that it generates than for the delay in theoretical understanding. Perhaps because it has been a devilishly difficult experiment to replicate. But then again, so was Michelson-Morely, so perhaps it is the anger engendered that is the greatest mystery.

5: Life--you might see my somewhat speculative papers about comets.

6: Viking-- I have blogged on earlier and even earlier.

7: The Wow! signal-- I discussed earlier.

8: A Giant virus
(haven't seen anything from his book on this)

9: Death
I've discussed in my booklet on Viruses, Genes and Sin, how death solves the parasite load problem. Thus death is a gift of God to counter the curse of sin. Think of it as a Sleeping Beauty fairytale, that the curse of the evil aunt is blunted by the blessing of sleep. That's why death is planned, not accidental. If we are puzzled by this, thinking that eternal life should be the goal of a Darwinian evolutionary model, then we need only read Genesis 1-3 to understand the purpose of death.

10: Sex--discussed earlier.

11: Free will -- discussed earlier.

12: The Placebo effect
This one is really only a problem for materialists. That is, people who believe that all communication must occur by transfer of particles, and that there are no long range correlations in space and time. I have earlier written on the correlations of space-time, but here I would only point out that repetitive actions will often achieve "muscle memory", which is somehow faster and less conscious than "brain memory". I watch my wife practising Chopin etudes, and over time her fingers become a blur of notes that she could not possibly be remembering in realtime, with the 250ms latency of the nervous system.

Thus the continued application of a medicine does not itself cure the pain, but rather initiate a series of dominos that result in amelioration of symptoms. If injection of morphine for 5 days triggers the endomorphins of the body to eliminate pain, what is to prevent the bodies "muscle memory" from releasing endomorphins even before the needle penetrates the skin or when replaced with saline? Such adaptive behavior has many beneficial consequences, not least is the playing of Chopin etudes, and it would be well within the bodies capabilities to have multiple triggers for certain responses. The only mystery about placebos is that it has taken this long to understand that the body can learn sub-conscious ways to control homeostasis.

12: Homeopathy
I have little sympathy for this practice, though I do understand its philosophy. If one can cure without dangerous chemicals, I am all for it. But were it reliably true, then Chinese medicine would be a whole lot more successful. For when I am sick, I and my pathogens lack the patience to try a hundred lesser treatments, and therefore I find it marginally to deadly dangerous as a proposed cure.

No doubt there are new things being discovered about water every year, and perhaps many of the homeopathic effects will find their explanation in future physics. Indeed, I consider myself the first to have discovered the work function of water exposed to UV light. But life is too precious to experiment on people with novel theories of water. Why have not homeopaths proved their case on a mouse model, like all the other drug companies? With regard to human treatments, the question is not qualitative (does a treatment work) but qualitative (how reliably does it work). Until homeopathy answers that question, it is not a treatment I would willingly undergo.

The New Scientist abstract now lists the 13 top items differently. Here's their new list:

NS 1. The placebo effect (same as #12)
NS 2. The horizon problem (new)
NS 3. Ultra-energetic Cosmic Rays (new)
NS 4. Belfast Homeopathy results (same as #13)
NS 5. Dark Matter (same as #1)
NS 6. Viking's Methane (same as #6)
NS 7. Tetraneutrons (new)
NS 8. The Pioneer Anomaly (same as #2)
NS 9. Dark Energy (new)
NS 10. The Kuiper Cliff (new)
NS 11. The Wow signal (same as #7)
NS 12. Not-so-constant constants (same as #3)
NS 13. Cold Fusion (same as #4)

NS 0. Not one to shirk my duty, here are my thoughts on the new list, as well as vague surprise that Michael has removed all his biology mysteries. I suppose the Darwinistas were upset that he would call an established fact "a mystery". Once again, it is the scientists who are the biggest mystery.

NS 2. The horizon problem is one of cosmological statistical-mechanics. If parts of the Big Bang have been incommunicado for 12 billion years, how did they all end up within millikelvins of each other, as if they were in some sort of equilibrium exchanging energy?

Well there are several ways to solve this problem. The "inflation" scenario has exchange through a "faster-than-light" expansion that solves the problem, but introduces another. It is one specific example of a tertium quid. That is, if A-->C, and C-->A, but A and C have never met each other, we have correlation without causation. This can be accounted for if there is a third object B, such that B-->A and B-->C. For example, lipstick and breast cancer are highly correlated, but not causal, because they are both things causally antecedent to both, namely, women. Therefore if it looks like the universe is in thermal equilibrium, though parts haven't spoken to each other in 12 billion years, perhaps it is because they are both causally connected to a third thing. It could be the physics below the Planck time, it could be a new force field (responsible for inflation), or even God. Given the freedom to pick any correlation one desires, such as inflation, the real mystery is why we think cosmology is such an exact science.

NS 3. Ultra-energetic Cosmic rays.
I've actually given talks on this before, where I propose a galactic (Milky Way) source for the cosmic rays below the "ankle". Michael is concerned about sources above the "ankle", which data suggest must have a source within our galaxy. I have proposed a more hypothetical "DC" accelerator for these particles, produced in cosmic jets. Since our Milky Way is thought to have a massive black hole at the center, it seems reasonable to assume a jet associated with our own galaxy that can make these TeV cosmic rays.

NS 6. Viking's Methane. This is just a rehash of Gil Levin's experiment, but apparently the ESA mission has remotely detected methane on Mars, now confirmed with Earth-based HST measurements. The reason Viking didn't directly detect methane with its atmospheric mass spectrometer, is that mass channel 16 was intentionally "blocked" in the design. Why? They didn't think there would be any methane to see.

 NS 7. Tetraneutrons
Not being a particle physicist, this one takes me by surprise. Given the ability of Los Alamos bomb codes to calculate nuclear reactions to the sub-percent level, I would have thought that all subatomic particles and forces were accounted for to great detail, barring some high energy stuff like the TeV Higgs Boson. But neutrons at 940MeV are so mundane, one would have thought that any binding force (or virtual particle E < 940MeV) would have been well researched by now. Then again, when the helioseismologists tested stellar interior models also derived from bomb codes, the mistakes were at the 10% level rather than the advertised sub-percent. So perhaps nuclear physics isn't so cut-and-dried as I had been led to believe.

 NS 9. Dark Energy
I've blogged on this earlier, as well as in the earlier Brook's review.

 NS 10. The Kuiper Cliff
This one hasn't been a mystery very long, simply because we haven't long possessed the ability to look for planetismals outside the orbit of Neptune where the light is so dim. So chalk one up for new technology:  high quantum efficient CCD's and robotic telescopes.

Since we haven't been looking for very long, this mystery might be solved tomorrow, and I would hesitate to include it with more venerable mysteries. Nevertheless, there is a peculiar correlation with my work. Seems that several of the Kuiper objects are comets, or as some would like to say, water-bearing asteroids. I looked at the distribution of comets in a earlier paper, and concluded that there was enhanced radial diffusion occurring from the Kuiper belt. I attributed this to the effect of "steam jets" whenever a comet came within the orbit of Mars. This would change the apogee distance of the comet, appearing as enhanced diffusion. Now most of the objects that Michael is talking about are on circular, not elliptical orbits, though given their short observation times, there may be some difficulty telling the two types of orbits apart. It would be my hypothesis that the absence of orbits on the outer edge of the Kuiper belt, is in part due to enhanced radial diffusion of comets that spend large portions of their time in this region.

If Michael reads this blog, I hope it sets his mind at rest; for the science is far less surprising than the scientists.

I wanted to wrap up this series of posts with a conclusion, and let you know how the fasting went.

After losing almost precisely 30lbs, I broke the fast on day 39 because I was a guest at a wedding, and it seemed extreme to not celebrate with the hosts. That was the day before Palm Sunday, so I fasted on Wednesday and Maundy Thursday to round out my 40 days. I would have fasted Good Friday, but once again, was invited to a Baptist Seder dinner, where eating is required. In 7 short days, I gained about 10 lbs, obviously a lot of water in that rebound.

And I learned something new about fasting this year. At the wedding feast that broke my 39 day fast, I avoided the tempting cake and pasta dinner, eating only the vegetables and the cheese appetizers.  (My wife had to drag me away from the amazing baked Brie.) And for the first time, I suffered no cramps or indigestion, which was a great blessing for the three and half hour drive back home that night. The secret lies in understanding your own special guests, your gut bacteria.

Bonnie Basler, a molecular biologist at Princeton, explains in a nice TED video, just how many bacteria are in you (10 times as many as there are cells in your body) and why they really are your friends. What she doesn't say, is where most of them are located: not on the skin, but in your gut (which might explain her hand motions throughout the video.) That is, humans can't digest food without a huge number of helpers. If you lose your gut bacteria, you will likely go on intravenous for a while until you get them back. In fact, that "proof" of evolution, the "useless" appendix, is now considered an essential reserve of gut bacteria in the event of a long fast. (So maybe I should add to the qualifications for a 40 day fast is that you still possess your appendix!)

So when I said earlier that my body had switched gears for fat metabolism, I should have added that my guest bacteria had adapted. Breaking a fast by dumping a load of sugar and starch would have startled them. Instead of bacteria digesting it properly, yeasts would have invaded and turned my insides into fizzy pop. But cheese, evidently, was a meal they could handle. Treat your guests well, and they will return the compliment.

Come Easter and all the chocolate, I've had my battles with yeast, so I should warn you that you may find it takes a bit longer to go back to the sugar levels you were accustomed to. But I have faith in my vestigial organ, and am grateful that unlike Darwin, it still has a purpose.

I am truly looking forward to Palm Sunday! That marks the 40 day point of my Lenten fast. Since I counted Sundays, it is 6 days sooner than the traditional accounting scheme which goes through Holy Saturday. Since it would seem irreverent to feast on Good Friday, I'll be restarting my fast on Maundy Thursday and continuing to Easter.

This weekend I augmented my soup intake with some carrots, celery, and a cooked onion (fished out of the Irish boiled dinner), and kimchi. Cabbages, onions and carrots all have some calories, so I can't say I've been quite as rigorous as I had hoped, but the vegetables do have potassium and fiber which help keep me sane.

Sanity is a touchy subject. A famous anecdote in physics tells about the fellow who asked Nobel prize-winner Eugene Wigner whether his brother-in-law, fellow Nobelist P. A. M. Dirac was crazy. Wigner replied that there was a fine line between genius and insanity. Alas, if only they were poles apart! For we all can recognize with nearly 100% confidence what mediocrity looks like, but we cannot tell the difference between genius and insanity. We construct our idea of "normal" by what we see most often, what we think is most probable. If most of our life is filled with mundane routine, and one day we wake up and find the birds singing better than Yitzhak Perlman, and the sky bluer than the cobalt, and the air sweeter than Chanel, does it mean that the world has changed, or that we have gone insane?

And when I'm fasting, one cup of coffee sends me into that world. The tears well up as I hear the firmament declaring His handiwork, day to day pouring forth praise, and night to night revealing knowledge. It is no accident that when coffee was introduced to Britain they viewed coffee-houses as near kin to opium dens. So when I spoke to a director of the Templeton Foundation after church on Sunday--that's the group that supports faith & science research to the tune of millions every year--it was fatefully after my first cup of coffee of the day. I was just waxing eloquent on the correspondence of Genesis 1 & 2 with anthropology and epigenesis, when he excused himself and said he had some urgent matters to attend to. But, as I said to my twins, it was great while it lasted.

Sometimes it is better, nay, necessary to be more than sane.

Some of the comments have asked whether miracles can be violation of laws of nature as well as demonstrations of purpose. For example, could Jesus have made the extra loaves and fishes out of nothing (ex nihilo) or was he only able to foreknow that everyone had stashed food in their sleeves?

My argument was that "laws of nature" are a useful fiction. There are only regularities that we as scientists and physicists, suppose / postulate / hypothesize to represent an underlying reality. That is why scientists are often called "naive realists" by philosophers, because they think of the "laws" as a one-to-one map from deep reality to their bench-top experiment. This assumption works most of the time, but it can be very disconcerting when it doesn't. Usually it means that something is wrong with the experiment, but occasionally it means something is wrong with the theory.

For 300 years, a sort of Newtonian, materialist, mechanical view of the universe worked remarkably well to explain physics and astronomy experiments. Then came quantum mechanics, and the whole system stopped working. Just for fun, Einstein's relativity also threw a monkey wrench into the business by making it a non-intuitive reality, though physicists have gotten used to relativity better than QM.

So what happened to naive realism?

The dirty secret is that it is still taught in physics classes from high school through college and graduate school. We then treat QM as if it is the exception to the rule, and has to be learned separately. No one wants to undermine the materialist philosophy of methodological naturalism that undergirds both naive realism and Darwinism. That would be too disorienting. It's a useful fiction, sort of like the "frictionless forces" we teach in freshman physics classes.

But since we know it is a fiction, how do we get to the truth?

The truth is as much a religious and philosophical statement as it is scientific. The whole reason Newton could come up with his famous 3 laws and turn the universe into a machine, is because he relied on the medieval monks who defined momentum, conservation laws, and forces. And the medieval monks could do this, because they believed in an unchanging God. The Greeks had made enormous strides in science, but ultimately failed because they didn't have an unchanging God. Ditto for the Chinese and the Babylonians. Islam is a different story, but shows the error on the other extreme, that an arbitrary and capricious god is just as detrimental to science as a pantheon of bickering gods.

So if we have an unchanging God whose attributes are regular and rational, then we can have a universe that displays "laws", but laws which are extensions of God's personality. God could have the sun rise in the west tomorrow if He wanted to, but He doesn't. This is because of His character. But on the other hand, He can heal my aunt of cancer if He wants, and He may very well chose to do so, for He is a personal God, an approachable God, as well as an infinitely just and unchangeable God.

It is precisely those twin characteristics of person and perfection that make Science possible. It also means that miracles are neither "violations of laws", nor "arbitrary acts of power". Rather, they are personal choices of an approachable, infinite God. Or to use seminary language, they are the revelatory immanence of the transcendent divinity.

This is why there is no qualitative difference between the sun rising in the east every morning, and the Red Sea parting for the Israelites. They are equally personal acts of the infinite God. The only difference is quantitative, that the Sun has been rising daily for all of recorded history, whereas the Red Sea only parted once that we know of. Thus there are a continuum of God's acts, a gray scale between the repeated "law" and the surprising one-off "miracle" of God's actions.

And as far as Science is concerned, there is no contradiction finding reasons for both. Some repeated events are still completely mysterious to Science, just as some singular events are easily explained away. The difficulty for Science is not the inductive step of finding a generalizable "law", but rather the step of identifying a philosophical connection to "deeper reality".  That is why the highly repeatable and often measured QM effects are still seen as "mysterious" to physicists, whereas the singular origin of the first life on Earth is thought to be "understood".

But having said that there is a continuum between law and miracle, I still do not mean that one can't tell the difference. We are constantly having to make split second decisions about probability. When I was young, I drove with a 1% chance of causing an accident. I reckoned it to be small enough to not matter. After 3 accidents in my 17th year, I lowered the threshold. It will never be 0% until I stop driving, but now I don't assume that the lady on the cell phone with the turn signal blinking will actually turn in the intersection, and I leave some space to maneuver if she starts heading my direction. In the same way, we spend our lives recalculating probabilities, learning the difference between law and miracle.

My daughters used to ask me "Does God answer prayer?" and I replied "Of course."
"But how do we know when God is speaking?" they asked. "You will learn." I said, "For he said, 'My sheep know my voice.'"

And that is what distinguishing miracles is all about.

Today hasn't been too bad at all. Strangely, as my weight approaches my college days, I find I am regaining strength and feeling very buoyant. However, Monday was another story. I was so very grumpy, I even took insult where none was intended. Perhaps the medievalists were right, and I was just too full of bile.

In any case, I accidentally dumped far too much salt in my broth that night, so much so that it burned as it went down my throat. Sort of like the salt gargle that my mom used to suggest for sore throats. I had to grab a glass of water and take a swig between spoonfuls of salty broth. Well, the osmotic pressure was just too much for my system to handle, and instead of absorbing the soup, my body treated it as a cathartic. The good news is that all the bile has been washed out, my disposition has improved, and I'm on good terms with my wife again.

Perhaps I should try this every five days or so, I didn't realize just how grumpy I can get. No wonder Aristotle talked of catharsis and the 19th century of digestive "cleansers". Wish all of my faults were as easy to fix.

No, that title is not an oxymoron. To a lot of people, miracles are things that violate physics, but that is because they have been taught that definition. This is a common but gross misunderstanding, in a large part due to the anti-supernatural modernism of the past 200 years. In this post, I hope to explain both what a miracle is, how common they are, and how you can "look under the hood" to see just exactly how God managed it.

Ancient and Medieval Miracles

Let's begin with Biblical and Early Church miracles. As many modernist and liberal theologians have attempted to show, they can be explained without "violating laws of nature". For example, in their accounts, the walls of Jericho fell because of an earthquake, or the Red Sea parted because of an unusually strong and steady wind, or the 5000 were fed with 3 loaves and 2 fish because most of the audience had secretly stashed their lunch so they wouldn't have to share it and were inspired by the generous example of the little boy. But the Bible doesn't claim that these events were miraculous because they violated some law, rather, they were miraculous because they occurred immediately after God's people called to Him. They were miracles of timing, not miracles of unnatural physics.

This is not to say that God could not have violated a law of physics, or that multiplying the loaves might not have been an ex nihilo creative act like the formation of the cosmos, but rather that the element common to all miracles is temporal proximity to a need preceded by a request. To put it another way, the magician can only impress us with his skill if he predicts the future accurately, and the result comes immediately after the specific request. All answered prayers are miracles.

Now we don't call a magician's acts "miracles", because we are all convinced that he has some secret information, he reads "magic trick" books, and spends hours practising his sleight-of-hand. It is highly likely that God does miracles in this same "information" sense where the Earth is his stage, and we the audience. Only, unlike the magician's accomplices, our lives really are in danger, and the miracle truly is our salvation. The magic act then, is a poor imitation of the real thing, the deliverance that is ours through the power and wisdom and foreknowledge of our Lord and Master.

Therefore it shows no disrespect, but the highest form of honor to ask "how did God do it?" For in seeking to know the methods of His power, we come to know something of the God who chose us before the foundation of the world to bear His name, and to represent His kingdom. If anything, our appreciation is increased when we fully comprehend the amount and type of information that it necessitates. John's gospel records no parables, but only miracles that he calls "signs". For miracles are first and foremost miracles of information, wordless parables packed with meaning, and it is both foolish and disrespectful to treat them as arbitrary demonstrations of limitless power.

David Hume's Atheism

So where did we get the idea that miracles were simply arbitrary acts of power that violate laws of Nature? I would argue that it happened in the Enlightenment, and the biggest blasphemer was David Hume.  Like Darwin and Spinoza and other atheists of this time period, the principal attack on Medieval Christianity was not the frontal assault on the existence of God, but an undermining of the need for God. If God were transformed into an accessory or preference rather than a vital power delivering us from certain death, then one can become a drawing room skeptic, cynically pointing out the foibles of priests and church hierarchies. The main attack against theism going back to 500BC with Democritus and Epicurus, was the denial of purpose. As Lucretius put it in 50BC, we must not think that we have ears for the purpose of hearing, or eyes for the purpose of seeing, or that lightening is under the control of the gods; rather, all these other things followed "laws of Nature", which have nothing to do with the gods.

It might have been a compelling argument before Christianity swept the world, but St Augustine, among others, showed how every "law of Nature" is dependent on the will of God. Thus atheism was banished from Christendom for over 1000 years, and during this time, Science was born and flowered and set fruit. And Man saw it, and thought it beautiful for its own sake, and took, and ate of it, and found that it held knowledge of good as well as evil.

So David Hume took over this argument from Lucretius, arguing that the laws of Nature were not, in fact, the laws of God, but mere regularities of observation that man in his enlightened state could manipulate to his profit. Newton's law of gravity was not a inner character of matter, nor a direct command of God, but merely an observation of a frequent occurrence that dropped objects fall in a manner consistent with the inverse square of the distance from the two objects. Newton himself, contributed to this "agnostic" view of gravity by denying any understanding of what the law meant metaphysically, simply stating Hypotheses non fingo, "I frame no hypotheses." Consequently, the ancient and medieval view that the heavens declare the glory of God was replaced by a mute machine that might have been originally built by a now distant and unapproachable God. 

Well if Hume is right, that laws are merely statements of regularity, then a miracle is a statement of irregularity, a violation of a law, a "super-natural" event. But by definition, if irregular things happened before, they would already be a law, so violations of laws have never happened before. Accordingly, when someone claims to have seen a miracle, we have to weigh the likelihood that they are lying with the likelihood that a previously unknown event has occurred. To Hume, it seemed a no-brainer that human deceitfulness was more likely, proving instead that we always project ourselves onto the world, and only God can penetrate through our total suppression of the truth.

Well many people have pointed out that Hume's argumentation is actually circular, since according to his definition of "laws" we can only learn what we already know. Science is not done as Hume said, nor are "scientific laws" mere generalized inductions of frequent occurrences. Nevertheless, his definition of miracle as a super-natural event in violation of a law of nature has been firmly fixed in the modernist mind. It does seem to "explain" why the miracles of Moses were so impressive to the Egyptians, or why Jesus' miracles convinced his disciples. After all, would card tricks have made disciples of uneducated fisherman?

If not super-natural, then what is a miracle?

Miracles

I want to convince you that Hume's definition is a two-fer: it elevates mechanistic, materialist science to the status of a god, while denigrating the purposes of a personal God to the meaningless whims of fate; it simultaneously makes an idol out of nature while denying God's informational message. In order for us to find miracles again, we must destroy the idol of Science, and replace it with the holiness of God.

Let us begin with what is the real nature of Science. Science is not discovering the "laws of Nature". Laws are things that are decreed, written, designed, established of people, by people, and for people. Nature is none of those things. If there is a law, then there is a purpose. And if there is a purpose then there is a purposer.  And if the purposer shows skill, then there is an intelligent designer. In recent years, many books have been written on this subject by both Christians and non-Christians alike, all of them concluding that the mechanistic, atheist/deist, Enlightenment, clock-like world has crumbled and can never be recovered. It has been undermined by Einstein's relativity, Bohr's quantum mechanics, Bell's inequality, Lemaire's Big Bang, and numerous failed theories that vainly strove to find a random or necessary universe.

Of course one can put one's head in the sand, study one grain of sand and say things like "Science is what scientists do", preferring to ignore the big picture. But the shingled beach is still there, and the sound they refuse to hear is the roar of the returning tide, advancing on their sand castle walls.  Every new discovery in science, whether cosmology, biochemistry or quantum mechanics shouts purpose, and Newton's postponement of judgement becomes harder and harder to sustain. For the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament declares his handiwork.

If then all of Science shows design, can there be something extraordinary? If every rising of the Sun is a miracle, then how can there be any extraordinary information, any personal message sent?

Now we are getting someplace. If on most mornings the sky turns pink and then the yellow sun leaps into the sky, but this morning the sun appears sullen and red, we take it to mean something. "Red sky at night, sailor's delight; red sky at morning, sailor take warning." Jesus said, You who can interpret the sky, can you not interpret the times? The same is true of miracles. They are unusual events that carry meaning.  The significance of the event is directly correlated to its level of unusualness, but the message is correlated to the complexity. If normally the dead stay dead, but if we should find a cat walking about whom many witnesses saw fall from a 50ft tree, we might shake our head and talk about 9 lives; but if we should find a man walking about whom witnesses saw dead and buried, we would expect a longer explanation.

Then a miracle is a highly improbable event that carries a personal message from God.

Anatomy of a Miracle

When I was in college, the school had vehicles that were used to transport students for various intramural events. Every Sunday I would drive one into Chicago to hold a worship service in a "halfway" house for societies discards. On one occasion, several students were driving back from a sporting event late at night, when the driver fell asleep on the interstate. The van veered off the road and by chance struck a parked semi-trailer. Since the trailer is higher off the ground than the car, the collision sliced off the top and killed the students. After this tragic accident, the school established a Cinderella policy that prohibited students from driving late at night.

No such policy covered personal vehicles, of course, and when my college friend had the use of the family station wagon one semester, and six of us made plans to catch a free ride from him from Chicago to Boston. A brilliant and procrastinating student, he had to pull two consecutive "all-niters" to finish his papers that semester. Accordingly he gave the keys to us, crawled into the back of the station wagon among the duffel bags, and slept for 8 hours straight. He awoke with the dawn in western Massachusetts, after we had driven through the night in shifts, keeping each other awake. Offering to drive, we asked if he were truly awake, and he assured us he had slept well. Within a half hour, the day had broken, our night-time sleep anxiety passed, and all six of us dozed off. Then he began to get sleepy, which he fought valiantly, not wanting to disturb us, but it was a tripled strength he had never encountered before. Doing 70 miles per hour, he blacked out on the Massachusetts turnpike.

Here's where the physics comes in.

The kinetic energy of an object is proportional to its mass times the square of its velocity. A station wagon is a heavy car, this one was one of the last of its breed. It was loaded with 7 students and their luggage. It must have been close to 4000 lbs. At 70 mph that comes out to the kinetic energy of a half stick of dynamite. When we hit a stationary object, all that kinetic energy must be dissipated by the front of the car. Car designers know this, and purposely build in "crumpling" to the frame, though in the 70's it wasn't a very common. But then in those lax days, we had no seat belts on either, so as the car came to sudden stop, we would have been launched en masse toward the front window. The kinetic energy of a 150 lb body at this speed is "merely" 1/20 of a stick of dynamite, say, a M80 "black cat", but concentrated in the part of our body that does the stopping, e.g. our head. And that is just the energy, even more difficult to dissipate is the momentum. The head may weigh only 10lbs; the remaining 140 lbs of body are still coming after the head is stopped by the window, crumpling the body, with the weakest point being the neck.

Now you begin to understand why seat belt laws are so important.

What actually happened?

Well, this section of the Mass turnpike was built long before the Eisenhower interstate system codified the construction standards. So instead of steel guard rails, it had the I-beam posts connected by chains on an unpaved shoulder. When our tires hit the posts, the rubber shredded, and the wheel hubs dropped into the dirt shoulder. This caused the car to list to one side and steer toward the posts. The kinetic energy was dissipated gradually as the hubs dragged in the dirt and the posts drummed away at the body panels of the car. We came to rest as smoothly, though not as quietly, as if we had used our brakes. Not a duffel bag was disturbed. The Mass state police who arrived at the scene shook his head and kept saying "you were very lucky".

But we were young.  We didn't shake our heads.  We didn't believe in luck. We thought we were invincible. We didn't get the message.

Another Miracle

Thirty years later, it was another accident, and another miracle. This time it was a '94 Suburban, even bigger and heavier than the Chevy wagon. My wife was driving with my seven children, and once again, only the front passengers were belted in.  Interstate I-81 in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia was steep and curving downhill with mountains on one side, 30 foot drop-offs on the other. It was 9:00 pm, twilight had faded, and she was driving with the cruise control at 65mph, the speed limit. Once again, narcolepsy struck without warning. The vehicle fishtailed out-of-control because the cruise control kept revving the engine, until the back bumper struck the mountain, rolled the vehicle twice, scattering glass and duffel bags across the road, and finally came to rest precisely on its wheels, 100 feet down the shoulder.

The fire/rescue team cut the doors off the vehicle and extracted two unconscious and four conscious passengers, putting on neck braces and strapping them to rigid boards before transporting them with the two that had climbed out the now non-existent windows. At the hospital, the x-rays showed no broken bones, and in fact, not much evidence of concussions, for the unconsciousness might simply have been sleep. The hospital staff was amazed. "The lucky bunch" they kept calling them, discharging them all 3 hours later.

But we were old.  We shook our heads.  We didn't believe in luck. We knew we were fragile. We got the message.

For if we had struck the mountain with the front bumper, the 6 unbelted children would have been human projectiles. If we had slid into the guardrail with a top-heavy roof, we would have rolled down into the valley. All manner of other scenarios could be imagined except this one. Where did all the linear momentum go? No guardrails bent. No mountains gouged. No rubber skid marks. Where did 2 tons of 65mph Suburban lose its velocity? And how did it lose it without forever maiming the children inside?

We resolved to visit the wrecker's lot on the way home, and the traffic was backed up for 3 miles on I-81. When a half-hour later we crept by the reason, it was a car resting on its roof, with two silent ambulances parked nearby, their inactivity an ominous sign. It could have been us. I pondered this as I stood in the lot, staring at the "ball of metal" that had been a Suburban. In addition to the crushed roof, crumpled A-pillar, and missing doors, the back bumper was lifted up about 6 inches.

Slowly the scenario unfolded. While fishtailing, the back bumper had hit the mountain, which instead of launching the children, had pressed them into their seats. The mountain acted as a pivot, converting linear momentum into angular momentum. As the car continued to go forward, the entire car now began to rotate, rolling down the dirt shoulder. So complete was the conversion, that the car left no skid marks as it rolled. The roof-top carrier and then the A-pillar absorbed the momentum slowing the rotation, and when the wheels came around, the entire suspension absorbed more of the angular rotation. Some momentum remained, however, and it completed a second roll before the suspension absorbed the remaining angular momentum, and the car was at rest, on its wheels. The children were not a rigid part of the car, so their linear momentum had to be converted to angular differently. In their case, centripetal force and friction with the interior converted their linear motion; the child laying on the floor never moved during the accident. From 65 to 0 mph in 100 feet. And the cellos came out of the vehicle in their soft cases still in tune.

What did it take for this stunt to work? A very precise application of force at the back bumper, an energy absorbing roof and nearly perpendicular roll that transferred momentum into the suspension, with no guardrails or other disturbances that would have applied a dangerous linear momentum to the rolling vehicle. I would venture that a seasoned Hollywood stunt driver might be able to duplicate it on his fourth or fifth try, if he was precise enough and survived the first attempts.

Precision is another way of saying information. Planning. Design.

The message was sent and delivery acknowledged, but what did it mean?

That is where physics fails to be of much use. And this is where David Hume begins to rub his hands in glee. For miracles, like the parables of Jesus, are double-valued. They can be taken, and indeed, must be taken, in two completely opposite ways. For the Humes of this world, miracles must be seen as random unlikely events, or else they would become paranoid and unable to function as a happy atheists. But for the Christian, miracles are demonstrations of God's power and provision. At least a dozen people were praying for my family that night, my prayer group alone had 8 people in it, and grandparents too had felt anxiety. With so much prayer, it was a fulfilment of a request, though perhaps not in all aspects. What did it mean? St Paul said it best, I am not my own, I was bought with a price.

Well, feeling mighty low today, and slipped in some carrots, green peppers and mushrooms. It's almost like eating, even if it sounds like an anorexic diet. I'd prefer not to pretend to eat, because the point of fasting isn't to substitute a low-cal diet, but to really fast, but I had driven 1000 miles the previous day, and my body just wasn't cooperating.

Why the mileage? Well, my family (minus me) was bringing my college girls back to college after Spring Break, and had a car-accident that necessitated a round trip of 1000 miles. Fasting was an advantage, actually, because driving uses very few calories, and my body didn't mind sitting in one spot for 16 hours. And when I did get sleepy, a diet coke was a major jolt to the system, having the effect of a red bull or No-Doze pill. So I felt like a long-haul trucker with my 44-oz diet coke in the cup holder.

But it did take 2 days to recover from the excitement. (No lives lost, no broken bones, but the paperwork almost makes up for it.) Now we just have to figure out how to get them all home..